A New Land…

We arrived in Japan on time (6.00 am local time), and after showing immigration a “Datascore Scoreboard Demo Unit” that we were bringing in to the country, we were able to relax and wait for the bus to Shinigawa. After a 90 minute bus ride, we were at our hotel and checked in to Brett’s room (we had arranged early check in), where we were able to have a shower and freshen up. We met up with the rest of the team (which comprised of Mark, Mikiko, Ange, Jack, Brett and myself) and caught a couple of taxi’s to Konami for our first meeting.

I have never experienced a meeting like this before. They spoke no English, and we didn’t speak Japanese. The others had already had interactions with these guys but it was a first for me, and quite enjoyable. Each party had their own interpreter (I assumed to ensure the company was being represented by somebody they could blame for miscommunication!!!), and watching the dance was quite unique. Particularly when Mark gave them a piece of his mind, which Mikiko had to translate!

At 12.00, Brett and I took Ange (as our translator) and caught a taxi to the Ginza Futsal stadium in (???). There was one person who spoke English there, but that was it. We had a look around, and discussed how we were going to set up our demo unit there. Once we had a plan in place, we found a place to sit down and have some lunch, and then caught a train to Nishifunabashi, where the Konami stadium we were setting up is based. Again, we looked around and came up with a plan of attack.

We caught a train to Akihabara – the technology centre of Japan (“Electric City”), where Ange left us, and we were going to meet up with Mark and Mikiko. We had some hardware we knew we had to buy for the stadiums (even though we brought most over with us). However We found the Acer W500 tablets for sale (second hand) for ~$500AU, which was better than what I get them for. Given they are “demo” units (the stadium hasn’t purchased them), we decided to buy these instead. The real advantage to this was that they would be in Japanese. The disadvantage is that I now have a long night ahead of me to configure them.

We found a touch screen all in one (for the player login screen), and other things we had to buy. All up, I negotiated it down to 250,000 yen (~$3000 AU). It came to ~275,000 so I was pretty happy with that price. It took a few different people to serve us, and I couldn’t believe how long the whole process took. I was expecting from the first thing I grabbed to have a sales person following me around like a puppy dog with all I was buying. Eventually we got out of there though.

We caught the train back to the hotel, which took us about 20 minutes. We then went to the restaurant at the hotel for a bite to eat and a couple of drinks. I excused myself pretty soon after eating, given the amount of work I had ahead of me. Mikiko left as well, as I needed somebody to tell me what the screens were saying! So she came up and helped me configure them.

A bit later Brett came up with “supplies” – a bottle of Jack Daniels, some Coke, a few Asahi cans, and some Pringles. So we were in good shape for the night. Mikiko and I configured two tablets and the touch screen, the wireless router, and fixed her Sportskeep to operate in Japanese. We were working on several little things along the way too. After Brett fell asleep on my bed, I kicked him out to his own room (the snoring was distracting us ), and Mikiko left about 2.00. By 3.00 I had nothing left in me and had to clear some room on the bed to get some sleep.